Religious debate does not sit well with the British psyche, at least not at a public level. For most people, even the Church of England is less a mounthpiece of god than a cultural peculiarity. It encapsulates perfectly the attitude of most Britons towards religion; largely ignored, but something utterly ensconced in our national make-up. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I attempt to wade into the current and ongoing debate between 'aggressive secularism,' and those that wish to see religion play a more active role in our political and social lives.
Now I should preface this by saying that I'm an atheist. Not a 'militant' atheist as Richard Dawkins would like me to be, but an aetheist nontheless. That I don't consider myself 'militant' should also not be interpreted as a defence of religion. Whilst I don't share Dawkins' fervour for intolerance, I agree that dogmatic religious belief is damaging and harmful.
What I find so endlessly tedious about this debate is that, whilst it dresses itself in modern guise, it is simply a rehashing of a positivistic assault on faith. Essentially the argument boils down to the fact that it is impossible to demonstrate, through logical or empirical proof, that god exists, and moral concepts predicated on the existence of a metaphysical entity are, by association, meaningless. Betrand Russel in his Sceptical Essays claimed that "it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there are no grounds whatever for supposing it is true," and A. J. Ayer took inspiration from this utterance when constructing his assault on metaphysics in Language, Truth and Logic.
If we look at Dawkins' assault on religion, obvious similarities come to light. In 2002, Dawkins gave a speech in the US on 'militant atheism.' Quoting the wonderful Douglas Adams, he questioned why it was that religious propositions (e.g. god exists) are not analysed and questioned in the same way that a scientific proposition would be. That is, testing hypotheses that are vulnerable to disproof through logical or empirical means. He reacts with indignation to the suggestion that there is perhaps something different about these propositions, something 'sacred' that distinguishes a religious from a scientific hypothesis. He sees no difference between the two categories of proposition, just as Russel and Ayer before him.
The problem with this positivistic assault on religion is that it utterly fails to understand the subject matter that it is attempting to subvert. When Dawkins attacks religion, he is not attacking faith but a caricature of faith that lacks any kind of social or historical nuance. I think Terry Eagleton got it pretty spot on when he wrote, "imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."
Dawkins clearly betrays a lack of historical understanding. According to the propositional logic from which his arguments descend, one can simply line up propositions uttered at any point over history and judge them on the same criteria of logical or empirical verifiability. Those that meet this criteria are kept, whilst those that don't are simply discarded as meaningless. When Dawkins demolishes the proposition 'god exists,' he fails to understand or consider the circumstances under which that utterance arose. Not only does this do grave injustice to many centuries of thinking, it is also an incredibly elitist and damaging philosophy to promulgate. By banishing questions of morality and metaphysics, the positivistic assault seperates discussion of morality from the practice of living morally. Its lesson is that you can talk about morals all you want, but it won't actually impact on their practical application.
Dawkins also fails to understand religious impulse, as well as the role that religion has played in our cultural and social evolution. Indeed, one can make the argument that the evolutionary biology which Dawkins claims to defend has very clear roots in religious conceptions of god and nature. Spinoza, for example, conceived of a pantheistic god that was indistinguishable from nature, combining, in so doing, faith in a divine power with a reasoned understanding of the world around him. The idea being that by investigating the world rationally, one took a step towards understanding god's 'plan.' The concept of a divine creator was a way of codifying and explaining the world, and also provided a framework under which further exploration could be conducted. That god is perhaps no longer necessary to this enterprise, thanks to great leaps in our understanding of the universe, does not render the idea of god a meaningless one.
What I think is most important, however, is that in his reasoning Dawkins is demonstrating what R. G. Collingwood called 'low-grade thinking.' When one compares one proposition against another with no thought as to why each proposition arose in the first place, one is entirely ignoring the baggage that comes with them. In contrast to propositional logic, therefore, Collingwood promulagated a logic of question and answer. Our thoughts, he reasoned, do not simply arise out of an ether, but are products of often hard and laborious problem-solving. It is only when we endeavour to unpick our thoughts that we realise that what we originally believed to be a proposition was in fact the answer to a very specific question, and it is only in so far that a proposition answers the question it was intended to answer that we can judge its verifiability. This, of course, necessitates knowing what the question was, and also understanding the context in which the question arose.
This, however, is a project to which Dawkins and other positivists will not consent. Instead they would rather attack and categorise a subject about which they know nothing, creating straw men and burning them to the ground to no effect whatsoever. Analysing the proposition 'god exists' is necessarily a historical examination of the circumstances in which that proposition arose. Propositional logic has demonstrated itself incapable and unwilling to take on that task, so it will always fail to adequately comprehend the motivations for religious faith. If Dawkins did endeavour to examine this proposition correctly, I think he would find a much more scientific story that he might imagine.
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